I’ve often wondered whether many problems in the world are not variations of attempting “exact optimization” — this being the only way to guarantee success in a winner-take-all reward system.

In engineering at least, when any kind of iteratively converging algorithm is run, the prototypical behavior is a fast convergence to a neighborhood of the solution, and then a really long process of getting to the exact one. In choosing exact optimization, a practically “good enough” solution is rejected in favor of expending a huge amount of resources to obtain the last 1% of the gap to optimality.

Where there is no bound to performance, a winner-take-all competition encourages ever-higher performance, driving progress. In reality, there is no system without some constraint that imposes a bound. We hope that rational allocation decisions will cause us to collectively halt at an approximate solution and move on to something else. However, this requires cooperative strategies. Winner-take-all is not stable for cooperative strategies, so we end up collectively committing resources disproportional to the amount of improvement we get in any observable metric. With the exception of the lone winner in each competition, everybody else suffers massive misallocation.

There are a number of absurd problems that arise from not developing a reward system consistent with a “soft” metric that gives some value to anything but the top rank.

Anyway, forget the publishers. There is one copy in the library, permanently checked out, on hold, or requested. Almost never seen in online stores, it sells for several times the list price when scalper123 occasionally trots it out on YahooMazonBay. Worst of all, nobody has bothered to make and distribute a pdf of it for the good of the masses. Er, wait, I mean, nobody has bothered to make a Fair Use copy for personal use.

And accidentally leave the pdf on an unprotected public server. (Please?)

Well, that was last week, and this is now. I am to this day amazed that Kazoo Books still had one (1) old, used, but perfectly good copy at list price. I wrote “had.” Good service and fast delivery, too. No fraud committed against me despite there being a phone transaction with a credit card. Highly recommend. Wait, this isn’t eBay, why am I writing this?